By Yvette Cardozo with photography courtesy of Sam’s Tours, Gunther Deichmann, Kevin Davidson, Wayne Hasson, Palau Visitor’s Authority
Vol. 12. No. 7
At a depth of 80 feet, as we stopped to admire three feet stalks of neon pink soft coral, the ocean suddenly became dark. It was not a cloud, but rather a huge school of snapper, easily over 1,000 of them, swimming in perfect formation above us. Dipping towards me in a silver wall, in an instant, they turned in unison and were gone.
But the ocean is far from empty. The snapper are replaced by a soup of life… waves of iridescent blue and orange anthias, so many pyramid butterfly fish they appeared like a swarm of locust, a mini wall of barracuda, half a dozen sharks and, to top it all, a resident Napoleon wrasse, a five-foot blue green puppy-like fish, who stopped just inches from my nose.
Blue Corner is Palau’s most famous scuba dive site for good reason. The “corner” is a wedge of rock jutting west towards the Philippines, pointing into currents that bring nutrients which attract a tapestry of creatures. Small fish come to eat the microscopic life. Large fish come from the depths to eat the small fish. Schools of pelagic fish come from open ocean to eat the large fish. And sharks, frequently attracted by strong currents, swim over the wall to swallow anything in sight. This is a site where reef hooks are used to keep the diver from being carried away, a tool that allows freed hands for photography or just holding a mask in place.
If it wasn’t for the diving, it would be easy to miss Palau, which sits seven degrees north of the Equator, southwest of Guam. Still, it’s not tiny–covering a 400 mile long archipelago of 586 islands surrounded by a barrier reef.
Aboard the Palau Aggressor II, we’re just getting started on our week of diving. A live-aboard… in this case nine staterooms and 18 passengers …sole purpose is scuba. The Aggressor’s mantra is “eat, sleep, and dive” count up to five dives a day doesn’t give you time for much else.
From Blue Corner, we go to Blue Holes, actually one large cavern with four openings on top. We drop down one chimney to find a window looking onto the iridescent blue. The walls are lined with pink and orange soft corals and hydroids which frame the opening in silhouetted lace.
Divemaster Scott Arni waves me over. There’s a clam tucked in the wall. Its bright orange with two inch whiskers and a white electric current running back and forth along its edge. It’s a flame scallop but locals have a better name: disco clam.
Palau has 67 named dive sites and, I swear, we are trying to hit them all. My favorite is a wreck; but it isn’t the bullets, helmets, guns or sake bottles that catch my attention. It’s the fishy soap opera going on atop the second boom. The Chuyo Maru was a converted cargo ship sunk, along with 38 other Japanese ships, on Mar. 30 and 31, 1944 as World War II ground to a halt.
Several three-foot-long, iridescent lipped giant clams have dug themselves in so deep, it’s hard to tell where coral ends and clams begin. Tufts of staghorn coral grow next to them, infused with clouds of tiny silver fish called glassy sweepers.
Three jack swim above, spooking the sweepers, which twitch back and forth in silver waves through the antlers. On top of this, a spotted grouper swims lazily, sizing up his next meal. And encrusted throughout are several anemones with bright orange clownfish that dart at anyone coming near their home.
But the show isn’t over. A bait ball of small fish appears acting as one, hundreds of fish nervously shift back and forth as a large barracuda cuts a swath of destruction through its center.
While my passion is fish… the larger the school the better… others in our group were after different things.
Doc and Steve from Texas wanted sharks. When we hung on reef hooks in current off Blue Corner, they watched excitedly as half a dozen assorted sharks circled us, coming so close even those with “point-and-shoot” cameras got good pictures. Laura, a young nurse from Hawaii, was always searching for exotic small stuff. She’s the one who sat patiently outside Chandelier Cave until a rare harlequin colored Mandarin fish finally popped up out of the coral. Siaes Tunnel, with an enormous cavern bathed in ethereal blue light, took care of the cave loving crowd.
And Ulong Channel, with its huge bait ball of fish, turtles, wrasses, fields of lettuce coral and, of course, more sharks, offer something for everyone including a current that made the whole experience seem like a Disney ride.
What’s special about Palau, Capt. Mike Farmer asked? The Galapagos and Cocos have big animals. Papua New Guinea has exotic small stuff. Sulawesi has muck with exotic macro. The Solomon Islands have large schools of fish and great coral. Fiji has brilliant soft corals.
And Palau? “Has them all.”
For WWII buffs, Peleliu is a 4.6 mile island that was the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific. What was supposed to be a weekend mop-up turned into a two month siege that left 13,000 U.S. and Japanese soldiers and sailors dead.
Local guide Tangie Hesus showed us rusty guns, tanks and airplanes. On Orange Beach, we gazed at water that held countless wrecks. Then we crawled through half a dozen of the 600 caves along “Bloody Nose Ridge,” the hideouts for Japanese soldiers.
“We’re still finding stuff… helmets, bottles, bayonets. Some shells are still live,” Tangie said. The rusty bits and pieces are now housed in a museum that once served as the main Japanese bunker.
Like so many island nations in the Pacific, Palau’s modern history was one long parade of occupations. The British arrived in the late 1700s, the Spaniards in the 1800s, then Germany, the Japanese (whose legacy includes the custom of carving legends into wood storyboards) and finally the Americans. Today, Palau runs itself as an independent island nation with an American style constitutional democracy.
Oh yes, the Rock Islands. They sit in the south central part of the Palau archipelago and are the remains of ancient, uplifted coral reefs.
Each island, no matter how small, has thick vegetation… palms and leafy trees so dense that the green mat blends into a velvet blur. The islands are undercut sometimes 40 feet by a combination of chewing marine mollusks, acid rain water and wave erosion.
The Rock Islands are also home to Jellyfish Lake.
Talk about weird. When the Rock Islands rose, 62 salt water lakes were cut off from the ocean. Five have golden jellyfish that live on sugars made by algae and, so, have stings so weak, you can’t feel them. One lake is open to visitors and at the end of our week, taking a break from diving, we visited its eight million inhabitants.
Jellyfish Lake is surrounded by a tall coral rim, which requires scrambling up a 100 foot ridge, then down again to the water. But these days, all the poisonwood trees that once lined the trail have been cut back, and there’s a cable to hold onto as you make the climb. Bring a bag with shoulder straps to hold your fins and mask, though, so your hands will be free to grab the cable.
The mangrove lake, complete with hanging vines and cypress knees sticking out of the water, is muddy olive, with five foot viz that adds to its surrealism. First there was one lone jellyfish… peach colored and translucent with a white filigree of gonads visible just under the cap. Then there were two, six, a dozen and suddenly, the water was milky with them.
Some jellies were the size of a thimble. Some were bigger than a grapefruit. And they all pulsed at different speeds… the small ones fast, the fast ones slow. It was one huge disjointed vibration. Finally, there were so many of them that the pulsing merged into a single froth … like swimming through giant champagne bubbles gone absolutely mad.
As we cut through this, the velvet jellies bumped our dive masks and bounced off our lips. They slid under our arms and between our legs.
It was a total giggle. And like the rest of Palau, it was truly memorable
If you go:
The best diving weather in Palau is December through March. Mid summer is rainiest and windiest. Water temperature is in the low 80s. Ashore, it’s hot and humid.
A week aboard the Palau Aggressor II is $2,695 to $2,895 US and covers lodging, meals, diving and heavy gear. Local currency is the US dollar and electrical outlets are North American.
The main town of Palau is Koror and the best place to buy storyboards (island legends carved in mahogany) is the local jail though if you want to see them carved, head for Tebang Wood Carving Shop.
Palau is served by Continental Air Micronesia through Honolulu and Guam.
For more information:
Palau Visitors Authority: www.visit-palau.com
Aggressor Fleet Ltd: www.aggressor.com
Sam’s Tours: www.samstours.com
Continental Airlines: www.continental.com